Rural Marketing

Unit II

Buyer Decision Process

Nimal C Namboodiripad Business School

 Buyer Decision Process
• Information Search
• The rural consumer gets his information from family, friends, relatives
outside the village, knowledgeable persons within the village and depends
less on commercial sources like mass media advertising, sales persons due
to less exposure.
• The village retailer is also an important and credible source of information,
especially for newer product categories and brands
• The rural customer depends on experiential sources like touch and feel,
demonstrations, trials etc.
• Exhibitions, road shows, Haats, mandis, and melas facilitate informal
consumer interactions
• Evaluation of alternatives
• For convenience goods—grocery items, etc. which are consumed within a
short time, the evaluation process is very short
• The evaluation process is longer for high-involvement products such as
tractors, two-wheelers, and product categories new to rural markets,
including mobile phones, personal computers, and DTH connections,

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 Buyer Decision Process
• Purchase decision
• Perceived risk is high among rural consumers as they find it difficult to
gather and process the relevant information.
• Due to this reason, they make a collective family decision for high-ticket
items
• For household products, the female member is also consulted, although the
final decision is taken by the male head of the family.
• Marketers need to address the perceived risk of rural buyers by showing
testimony of users and ensuring service delivery at the consumer’s
doorstep.
• Post purchase behaviour
• Word of mouth is very important in rural market.
• Hence ensuring customer satisfaction is critical

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 Product adoption Process
• The adoption process helps to turn a potential buyer into a regular user.
• It is important for marketers to understand rural hierarchies and tap into
local opinion leaders to help brand adoption and diffusion within a rural
community.
• For example, doctors (for healthcare products) or progressive farmers (for
farm inputs) could be tapped as opinion leaders.
• Colgate taps into school teachers to reach children (early adopters of more
expensive toothpaste) through its ‘Bright Smile. Bright Future’ programme.
• Rural consumers are slower to adopt new brands and categories than their
urban counterparts.
• Luckily for marketers gaining loyalty is easier than generating trial.

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 Diffusion of innovation
• The flow of technology—from international boundaries to metros, to cities,
to towns, to the kasba (feeder town), to the village, to the rural consumer—
is a long chain.
• This long chain translates into less awareness of evolving products and
services for the rural consumer
• The rural consumer is also limited in his ability or desire to adopt
innovations due to low levels of literacy
• Word of mouth promotion, demonstrations and personal selling are the way
to go.

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Adoption of Innovations

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